Breathturn into Timestead (41 page)

honig- / ferne, die milch- / nahe | honey- / distant, milk- / close: Compare Exod. 3:8: “And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”

Elektronen-Idioten | electron- / idiot … Datteln | dates: The double meaning of the English word “dates,” as
Datteln
, the fruit, and as
Daten
, dates and even data, the latter suggested by the “Elektronen-Idioten” of the previous line, according to at least one commentator, was an intended pun by Celan (
Oelmann, Deutsche poetologische Lyrik nach 1945
, p. 394f; quoted by Konietzny).

menetekelnde / Affen | portentous / apes: Compare Dan. 5:24–27: “Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. / And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. / This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. / TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” Rembrandt's painting
Belshazzar's Feast
shows the moment when the divine hand writes on the wall the Hebrew phrase that only Daniel can decipher. Celan had seen this painting in the National Gallery in London.

II

“Schlafbrocken” | “Sleepmorsels”

June 13, 1966, Paris. The first poem Celan wrote after his release from Sainte-Anne, the psychiatric clinic in Paris where he concluded a six-month internment after his attempt to kill Gisèle on November 24, 1965, an internment that took him first to the Garches, then Suresnes, and finally the Paris psychiatric clinics (see Introduction, p. xxxviii). The first draft has the dedication “for Gisèle.” A first printing by Brunidor, Vaduz (Liechtenstein), included an etching by Gisèle.

“Die Wahrheit” | “Truth”

July 29, 1966, Paris.

“Aus den nahen” | “Out of the near”

August 1–4, 1966, Moisville.

“Ausgeschlüpfte” | “Hatched”

August 8, 1966, Paris.

Gebetmäntel | prayercoats: The German word connotes the tallith, or prayer shawl, which is, however, traditionally white. Compare the poem “Schaufäden, Sinnfäden” | “Sight threads, sense threads” (p. 86).

Brandkraut | lampwick: Plant of the
Phlomis
family, possibly here
Phlomis lychnitis
, which has astringent qualities; its leaves have been used to make wicks for oil lamps.

“Ewigkeiten” | “Eternities”

August 9, 1966. Celan has at least six poems with the word “eternity” or its plural in the title or opening line: “Ewigkeiten” | “Eternities” (p. 140), “Die Ewigkeiten tingeln” | “The eternities honkytonk” (p. 162), “Die Ewigkeit” | “Eternity” (p. 176), “Die Ewigkeiten” | “The eternities” (p. 272), “Huriges Sonst” | “Whorish else” (p. 326), and “Die Ewigkeit” | “Eternity” (p. 398).

“Der puppige Steinbrech” | “The perty saxifrage”

August 20, 1966, Moisville. The next poem was also written on that day, and the following one begun.

Steinbrech | saxifrage: The German name Steinbrech literally means “stone breaker,” as does its Late Latin root,
saxifrage
; from Latin, feminine of
saxifragus
, “breaking rocks,” from
saxum
, “rock,” and
frangere
, “to break” (
Merriam-Webster
). Traditionally thought to indicate its ancient medicinal use for treatment of urinary calculi, i.e., kidney stones.

“Die zwischenein-” | “The between-whiles”

August 20, 1966, Moisville.

Gletschermilch | glacier milk: Waters of a glacial stream in which particles of light-colored silt are suspended.

“Der geglückte” | “The successful”

Begun August 16, 1966, in London; finished August 20, 1966, in Moisville.

Paulownia: A tree Celan liked and links both to his homeland, the Bukovina, and to his name, Paul, though it also appears in darker circumstances in the poem “La Contrescarpe” (in
Die Niemandsrose
). As this poem will be referred to several times in the commentaries but is not included in this volume, I will insert it here in its entirety:

LA CONTRESCARPE

Break out the breathcoin

from the air around you and the tree:

so

much

is required from him

whom hope carts up and down

the hearthumpway—so

much

at the turning,

where he meets the breadarrow

that drunk the wine of his night, the wine

of the misery-, the kings-

vigil.

Didn't the hands come along, the awake

ones, didn't happiness, deeply

embedded in her chalice-eye, come?

Didn't the human-toned, lidded

Marchpipe come along, that gave light,

back then, widely?

Did the carrier pigeon sheer off, was its ring

to be deciphered? (All those

clouds around it—they were readable.) Did the

flock suffer it? And understand

and take off while it stayed away?

Roof shingle slipway,—on pigeon-

keel what swims is laid. Through the bulkheads

the message bleeds, time-barred things

go overboard:

Via Kraków

you came, at the Anhalter

railway station

a smoke flowed toward your glance,

it already belonged to tomorrow. Under

paulownias

you saw the knives stand, again,

made sharp by distance. There was

dancing. (Quatorze

juillets. Et plus de neufs autres.)

Overdwarf, monkeyverse, slantmouth

mimed lived experience. The lord,

wrapped in a banner, joined

the swarm. He snapped

himself

a little souvenir. The self-

timer, that was

you.

O this dis-

friending. Yet again,

there, where you have to go, the one

exact

crystal.

“Auf überregneter Fährte” | “On the rained-over spoor”

August 23, 1966, Moisville.

“Weißgeräusche” | “Whitesounds”

September 5–October 10, 1966. A poem commissioned for a Festschrift for Hans Mayer; the first draft has the initials H.M. as title.

Flaschenpost | bottle post: Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 762) locates the idea of the poem as a letter in a bottle or a bottle post in an improvised contribution by Hans Mayer on a poem by Goethe at an October 1957 meeting, where Celan and Mayer first met. Mayer couldn't locate the source of his quote after Celan asked for it on several occasions, but in a letter to the literary scholar Joachim Seng, he says: “In remembrance of conversations with Adorno on his favorite theme of ‘literature as an esoteric bottle post.'” Wiedemann further suggests that with this poem Celan is thanking Mayer for having sparked the idea formulated in 1958 in his Bremen Prize speech: “A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In that way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward” (
PCCP
, p. 35).

“Die teuflischen” | “The devilish”

September 1, 1966, Moisville.

“Die Dunkel-Impflinge” | “The dark vaccination candidates”

September 6, 1966, Paris.

“Die zweite” | “The second”

September 27–October 5, 1966, Paris.

“Das ausgeschachtete Herz” | “The excavated heart”

October 7, 1966. The following poems also started on this day.

“Die fleißigen” | “The industrious”

October 7–9, 1966.

Synkope | syncope: A rich word in both languages that can refer to (1) in medicine, loss of consciousness, or (2) in linguistics, the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel, or (3) in music, a musical effect caused by a syncope, missed beat, or off-the-beat stress.

Halljahr | jubilee: Compare Lev. 25:10–13: “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. / A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you; ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of the undressed vines. / For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy unto you; ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. / In this year of jubilee ye shall return every man unto his possession.” Compare also the poem “Und Kraft und Schmerz” | “And strength and pain” (p. 380).

der barock ummantelte, / spracheschluckende Duschraum | the baroquely cloaked, / language-swallowing showerroom: In the extermination camps, the gas chambers were camouflaged as shower rooms.

Stehzelle | standing-cell: Wiedemann points to two occurrences of this word in newspaper articles in Celan's possession, the first describing a visit by legal experts to such a cell in Auschwitz in December 1964, recorded in
Die Welt
of January 13, 1965, as is the following quote from the same article: “Under no circumstances could one speak here of a disparagement of the victims. In the standing cells of Bloc 11 in Auschwitz many detainees starved to death” (
BW
, p. 763).

“Die kollidierenden” | “The colliding”

October 11, 1966, Paris–October 14, 1966, Cologne. From October 11 to October 18, 1966, Celan was in Germany for poetry readings. A draft of the poem was found on an October 12 concert program from Cologne, which Celan sent to his friend Ruth Kraft.

“Eingehimmelt” | “In-heavened”

October 24, 1966, Paris. Celan dated the poem with his full address, “78 rue de Longchamp, XIVth,” a rare event.

Lidschlagreflexe | eyeblinkreflexes: An involuntary reaction, the corneal reflex is the blink that occurs upon irritation of the eye. It is mediated through the trigeminal nerve (cranial nerve); its aim is to protect the eyes from foreign bodies. The absence of corneal reflex may indicate damage to the brain stem (adapted from
MedicineNet.com
and other sources). The corneal reflex is also very noticeable during the dream-heavy period of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Celan had encountered the term in his reading of Reichel/Bleichert,
Leitfaden der Physiologie des Menschen
.

“Wenn ich nicht weiß, nicht weiß” | “When I don't know, don't know”

December 23, 1966, Paris. Celan's fourteenth wedding anniversary. On December 27, 1966, he wrote to Gisèle: “I wrote a hard, difficult to translate poem, with among other lines, this one: ‘The Jewess Pallas Athena'—” (
PC
/
GCL
, #469).

Wenn ich nicht weiß, nicht weiß | When I don't know, don't know: Compare the opening line/stanza of Hölderlin's hymn fragment “Heimath” (Home): “Und niemand weiß” (and no one knows). Otto Pöggeler also points out that “in the ode ‘Rousseau' one finds the line ‘and no one / knows how to show the modest way' [‘und niemand / weiß den bescheidenen Weg zu weisen']. The second stanza of the elegy ‘Brot und Wein' says concerning the ‘wonderful' goodwill of the heavenly ones: ‘and no one / knows from whence and what befalls one from it' [‘und niemand / Weiß von wannen und was einem geschiehet von ihr']” (
SPUR
, p. 270).

Aschrej | Ashrei:
Ashrei
(Hebrew
) is a word meaning “happy,” “praiseworthy,” or “fortunate” as in Deut. 33:29: “Happy art thou, O Israel.” The Ashrei is a prayer that is recited at least three times daily in Jewish prayers, twice during Shacharit and once during Mincha. It is composed primarily of Psalm 145 in its entirety, with a verse each from Psalms 84 and 144 added to the beginning and a verse from Psalm 115 added to the end. The first two verses that are added both start with the Hebrew word
ashrei
, hence the prayer's name. In Luther's translation, the verse from Deuteronomy reads: “Wohl dir, Israel!” The other German word that most closely translates this word is
Heil
.

der Jüdin / Pallas / Athene | the / Jewess / Pallas / Athena's: Writes Barbara Hahn in her book of the same title:

In Greek mythology, Pallas Athena with her double name wears a helmet upon her head and a shield across her breast. Ovaries, however, she does not have. She was neither born of a mother nor can become one. She is the daughter of her father, Zeus, from whose head she sprang, and which, in some traditions, split asunder, so that in thunder and lightning she could come into the world … Athena, this daughter without a mother, interrupts all female genealogies and founds no traditions. Pallas Athena, the warrior, the thinking woman, whose symbol is the owl, is a unique occurrence. A point without history, with no before and no after.